Your favorite writer Angela Carter was a socialist too!
In 1985, the legendary Angela Carter sat down for an interview with Lisa Appignanesi. In the video below, they discuss Freud, work, politics, The Bloody Chamber, motherhood, and de Sade, among other things—including Carter’s socialism, which she argues works in tandem with her fabulist sensibility.
LA: You say, you have said, that you’re a socialist, and yet—
AC: Absolutely! What do you mean?
LA: [Laughs] Yet I mean, the kind of writing that you do has very little to do with that kind of gritty naturalism that one associates normally with socialist writing.
AC: You mean that Stalinist deviation? Soviet social realism? Well, that’s true. . . Restructuring of the way that we perceive reality is an essential part of being a socialist. Or why bother? You’re not a socialist because you think that it’s a good idea for the world to be endlessly recapitulated just as it is this very minute.
True enough. And if you’re on a Carter kick (it’s her birthday, after all) you may also enjoy this Angela Carter fan art and/or an excerpt from her biography in which she definitely gives no fucks. We stan.
